Oh, if only they were alone with that flaw ... . I call it the George Lucas Problem, in which filmmakers have enough power to insulate themselves from constructive feedback — in particular people who wield the script- and movie-editing equivalents of red pens. The result is bloated movies in the tradition of Titanic, announcing their grandiosity with their running times. Hence: a 135-minute movie for kids called Speed Racer.

Anyway, in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, Iron Man retained its crown and became the first movie to post a perfect score in consecutive weeks. Speed Racer finished fourth.

Methodology

Culture Snob’s Box Office Power Rankings balance box office and critical reception to create a better measure of a movie’s overall performance against its peers.

The weekly rankings cover the 10 top-grossing movies in the United States for the previous weekend. We assign equal weight to box office and critical opinion, with each having two components. The measures are: box-office gross, per-theater average, Rotten Tomatoes score, and Metacritic score.

Why those four? Box-office gross basically measures the number of people who saw a movie in a given weekend. Per-theater average corrects for blockbuster-wannabes that flood the market with prints, and gives limited-release movies a fighting chance. Rotten Tomatoes measures critical opinion in a binary way. And Metacritic gives a better sense of critics’ enthusiasm (or bile) for a movie.

For each of the four measures, the movies are ranked and assigned points (10 for the best performer, one for the worst). Finally, those points are added up, with a maximum score of 40 and a minimum score of four.

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